• The new perspective of diversity is not just about emphasizing groups at the expense of the whole; it is also about treating groups as having saved up a right to special privileges in proportion to how much their purported ancestors were victimized in the past. This quid-pro-quo view has become a quasi principle that aims to encompass American life. It is invoked by its advocates, for example, as a reason why the federal government should set aside a certain percentage of federal contracts for minority-owned businesses, and why the federal courts should not apply the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions.

But is it more than a matter of government mandates. The diversity principle is also a belief that the portion of our individual identities that derives from our ancestry is the most important part, and a feeling that group identity is somehow more substantial and powerful than either our individuality or our common humanity.

• Diversity, in effect, enshrines certain kinds of factionalism as a universal good, just like liberty and equality. Well, no, not just like liberty and equality — better. Diversity raised to the level of counterconstitutional principle promises to free people from the pseudo-liberty of individualism and to restore to them the primacy of their group identities; and diversity raised to the summit of “critical thinking” insists that traditional notions of equality are a sham. Real equality, according to diversicrats, consists of parity among groups, and to achieve it, social goods must be measured out in ethnic quotas, purveyed by group preferences, or otherwise filtered according to the will of social factions.

• Once we allocate political rights by group identity, the assignment of group identity becomes the crucial determinant of everything else for the individual; the group gains a strong interest in ensuring the conformity of its members; the individual faces powerful pressure to conform; and the resentments only multiply.

And one section dealing with a common theme around these parts:

Diversity makes us think that, deep down, all religions say the same thing. But all religions don’t say the same thing, and Islam especially dissents from the idea that its Truth is merely a local variant of the generic truth available in other flavors at other stores. To the extent that it blinds us to the kind of intellectual inquiry we need to understand these matters, diversity is not just folly; it is dangerous folly.

Religious toleration is, of course, nothing new, and if we are to understand the religion of diversity, we have to distinguish between several kinds of toleration. One form, which might be called Jeffersonian tolerance, regards all religions as more or less the same sort of mistake, and therefore equally due condescension. Tolerance of this nature may be based on deism, agnosticism, atheism, or mere indifference. It proceeds by a principle of prudence, to the effect that, as people believe many and conflicting things, the common good is best served by not making an issue out of anyone’s faith.

ADDENDUM:

Noel asks: Also, are you criticizing “Jeffersonian tolerance”?

No. I’m all in favor of it. I just found it amusing the way Wood openly stated what is usually the implied subtext, namely, that Jeffersonian tolerance is predicated upon treating religions as “more or less the same sort of mistake.” Of course, being too open about that disdainful indifference would undermine the sort of cultural unity it was designed to promote. If anything, I would only like for more spiritual-not-religious types to appreciate the weighty significance of Jefferson’s razor.

So, then, to clarify the rest of my interest in these excerpts:

I was struck by the succinct way Wood described the three lenses, if you will, through which we make sense of our identity — individuality, group identity, and common humanity. Now, as an (Isaiah) Berliner, I’m naturally predisposed to see these three perspectives as basically irreducible, and prone to being in conflict with each other. That is, none of the three can ever be the One True Perspective. Each one makes sense in the right context, or the right proportions.

Human beings being human beings, though, we tend toward Procrusteanism. When we find a concept or perspective we think is accurate, we tend to want it to be true at all times, in all situations, and so we stretch or chop the facts as needed. As an example of people who cling too tightly to individualism as an organizing concept, think of rigid, dogmatic libertarians, and the lengths to which they go to avoid acknowledging anything like a common humanity based on levels of obligation.

Likewise, diversity can be turned into an unquestionable moral virtue in and of itself and pushed to absurd lengths in contexts where it doesn’t belong. Take the arts, for an obvious example.

• Lena Dunham is likewise accused of being racist for not including any ethnic characters in her TV show. (Terry Sawyer, the author of the linked article, does a good job limning the incoherent, contradictory demands even within the diversiphile camp.)

• Pitchfork magazine’s readers vote for their favorite 200 albums of the last fifteen years, and diversiphiles complain that there aren’t enough women on the list. This leads the intellectual featherweights at the Atlantic Wire to pop their thumbs out of their mouths long enough to muse about just how misogynist Pitchfork’s readers might be.

• It is a popular cause online to talk about the VIDA count, and whine about how women aren’t proportionally represented as either reviewers or reviewees in the major literary outlets, as if the right to a good shot at a successful literary career is on a par with the right to higher education. Some diversiphile writers, like Roxane Gay, even go so far as to call for quotas as a solution to this “problem”. Now, one can argue, andIcertainlyhave, that making literary criticism into yet another zero-sum battle between “white men” vs. “everyone else” is an insanely reductive and misguided obsession, that the purpose of literature and criticism is not to advance trendy social justice-y causes, and that the content of the art is what matters for the purpose of criticism, not the race and gender of the author, protagonist, or audience, but in doing so, one has to argue uphill against the facile assumption that “more diversity” is such an obvious plus that only bigots would oppose it.

This is what I mean when I say that diversity means different things in different contexts. Not every situation requires balanced ratios of gender or race. Not every disparity is a problem indicating oppression and requiring a solution. The world isn’t going to be “fixed” when we get the ratios all correctly sorted.

Not only that, but there isn’t even any consensus among diversiphiles as to what the ultimate goal of all this diversity is. Some think that by being exposed to people of all different races, religions and ways of life, the rough edges of our tribal natures will be sanded off, and we will better appreciate our common humanity. Others, especially SJWs, are fixated on preventing what they call “cultural appropriation”, by which they mean greedy white people “stealing” ethnic cultural motifs. This amounts to rigidly defining and strictly policing the borders of what they consider to be different cultures. The fact that their rhetoric and logic is the mirror image of white separatism doesn’t trouble their little pea-brains in the slightest. One Slymepitter whose opinions I generally like, a self-described right-wing black woman from New Zealand, once summed it up in a way that I actually saved for reference:

The idea of appropriation/cultural intellectual property is another one that creeps me out. People learn and adopt and remix cultural emblems and traditions because that’s the nature of how we interact and assimilate/create new paradigms. If you cut off a culture from the ability to be remixed by those outside it, then you are killing it. There is no difference from that to putting it in a museum or locking it away an a sanctuary somewhere. Cultures that you cannot adopt or enter into are endangered.

If you wanted to kill a minority culture than the best way to do so is to tell people they cannot be part of it, and it will ensure that the only culture that can be used/adopted by anyone is the majority one, which can be replicated and reused and entered-into without fear of repercussions.

They’re a movement of cultural exterminators.

And finally, I think certain conservatives do have a valid point when they scoff at the progressive fixation on diversity as being cosmetically diverse but ideologically conformist. That is, it’s not too hard to find smug progressives who pride themselves on their magnanimous ability to tolerate the presence of people who look and speak differently from them while breaking out into hives upon encountering someone who substantively disagrees with them.

The funniest thing, in my opinion, about this paint-by-numbers Guardian column kvetching about the lack of gender diversity among the recent spate of journalism startups is the invocation of Arianna Huffington as some kind of revolutionary trailblazer. Well, as Emma Goldman would no doubt have apocryphally said, if your revolution isn’t being led by a ditzy heiress who’s built a fortune on the backs of countless unpaid writers, I don’t want it. I mean, my god, I think I’ve seen teenage virgins on Reddit who aren’t as awestruck by the mystical powers of female genitalia than feminists like Bell.

Besides, here’s a prominent woman of color to tell you and your superficial notions of diversity to go fuck yourselves.

The sad fact is, we can’t publish what we’re not submitted. Tor UK has an open submission policy – as a matter of curiosity we went through it recently to see what the ratio of male to female writers was and what areas they were writing in. The percentages supplied are from the five hundred submissions that we’ve been submitted since the end of January. It makes for some interesting reading. The facts are, out of 503 submissions – only 32% have been from female writers.

…So here’s the thing. As a female editor it would be great to support female authors and get more of them on the list. BUT they will be judged exactly the same way as every script that comes into our in-boxes. Not by gender, but how well they write, how engaging the story is, how well-rounded the characters are, how much we love it.

I consider myself politically progressive, but there are a few major sticking points that keep me perpetually at odds with my would-be allies. I hold in utter contempt anyone who would attempt to dictate to me a list of things I am forbidden to say, and it is generally more from the left than from other quarters that such dictation comes. I am part of that minority that continues to consider political correctness a real threat, and not a momentary excess of the early 1990s, when we heard all that reactionary huffing about how soon enough they’ll be making us say ‘vertically challenged’ instead of ‘short’ and so on. I speak not with Rush Limbaugh but with Vladimir Nabokov when I say that I am horrified by the limitation of free expression, by which I don’t mean the usual ‘expression of unpopular ideas’ beloved of ‘card-carrying members of the ACLU’, but rather the creative use of language where a Schillerian free play of the imagination is the only source of regulation. I believe the desire to regulate externally stems not just from a misunderstanding of how political progress is made, but also of how language functions.

…If my would-be political allies were being grown up about these things, they would understand that what they are really after is not something that can be attained by setting down, once and for all, the complete index nominum prohibitorum. Rather, it is a matter of cultivating virtues like tact and discretion: virtues for which there are no easy rules to be mastered in an a priori way, but which always depend upon the combination of a million different social cues.

“The desire to regulate externally” being, in my opinion, the heart of it. Most of the progressive linguistic police I’ve encountered are extremely distrustful of the anarchic, nebulous nature of language, as they are with anything that doesn’t fit neatly into their conceptual taxonomy. I’ve heard that tendency described variously as “rationalism” or “theorism”, but I’ve started thinking of such uptight people, progressive or reactionary, as Procrusteans. Above all their professed causes, they care most about the internal consistency of their worldview, the supposedly clear, strong connections between their axioms; they’re happy to stretch or amputate any inconvenient facts or realities as needed.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the Internet has struggling and/or failed writers standing around forlornly at the end of every URL off-ramp. It’s an unforgiving, stingy market for them. Thus I can’t realistically fault some poor fucker with an utterly useless English degree and an unread manuscript for grasping at any straw that promises a slight career advantage, even if it might seem unsporting, say, to invoke racist or sexist discrimination in order to shoulder one’s way closer to the head of the line. Whatever idealistic bullshit you may occasionally read about the moral benefits of fiction, writers, like anyone else, will do what they have to in order to get ahead.

It is tedious, however, to see the faux-civil-rights issue of gender imbalances in prominent literary outlets becoming an increasingly popular spectator sport, complete with all the snark and posturing typical of online drama. But whatever, fine; let’s just say you somehow manage to browbeat all the prestigious journals into presenting an equally-divided pie chart of male and female authors and reviewers in every issue. Then let’s say that a new study reveals that over the course of a year, male authors received positive reviews 58% of the time, while female authors only received positive reviews 39% of the time. Will that be accepted as just the way it goes, or will the same insinuations and accusations of sexism be leveled again in an attempt to game the refs? As you can guess, I’m inclined toward cynicism.

What I’ve come to realize, thanks to VIDA and the Count, is that my feminist convictions do not make up for the low number of books by women I’ve reviewed. Not yet. Good intentions are not enough. It’s people like me, people aware of the persistent sexism of our society, who need to do a better job of promoting books by women. To ignore the gender disparity in publishing is to perpetuate it. I can’t do that any longer. Instead, I will continue to champion all of the books I love in every way I can—only now I will do so with a clearer understanding of just how far we still have to go in building the literary community that we all deserve.

You’ve gotta pity these poor bastards. I mean, imagine being so insecure, so incapable of contemplative self-confidence, so desperate for some sort of tangible proof of your non-sexist or non-racist intentions that you attach this overweening significance to whichever metric you can get your hands on. Yes! That’s it! 43% of the music I listen to is created and performed by non-white non-North Americans! 51% of the books I read are by female authors! Woohoo, I’m winning at cosmopolitanism! Winning like Charlie Sheen! The numbers don’t lie!

(Would it fuck with their heads too badly if someone were to suggest that obsessing over stats and pie charts is so typically white male?)

One thing I didn’t mention the last time this topic came up: I find it interesting that it’s just matter-of-factly assumed that male reviewers and readers would naturally gravitate toward the writings of other males. Why? Because of pheromones? No, seriously, every time I read one of these whinges, that’s presented as the default, the unconscious state of things requiring education to overcome: men naturally consider other men’s writing to be superior to women’s even when it’s “clearly” not. Conversely, though, white knights like this guy do seem to believe that women possess some sorts of unique ways of knowing, experiencing and communicating, which suggests that there’s very little daylight between their views and those they scorn, like, say, V.S. Naipaul. The narcissism of small differences, indeed.

But leaving aside the extremely tendentious attempt to interpret everything from ideas to language as “gendered” by society, doesn’t this quite literally — not figuratively, but literally — beg the question? Doesn’t it, in other words, presuppose the existence of a more-or-less zero-sum struggle between men and women for power, status and resources, one which all the participants are instinctively aware of and one where their natural inclination is to stand in solidarity with their fellows? In other other words, aren’t you simply finding the “proof” you set directly out in search of to begin with, that men see themselves as directly competing against women in the war of language and ideas because misogyny that’s why? In a world of unlimited writerly wants and scarce publishing resources, we dudes are all brothers of different mothers, amirite?

Oh, well. This is just one of those things that gets magnified far out of proportion to its actual importance, most likely due to the massive overrepresentation of frustrated lit majors tweeting away on the social web, bitter over their lack of an actual literary career. The real fun will begin when the other dozen genders plus the otherkin start hollering about how they’re being systematically overlooked by the cisbinary publishing industry, and the postmodern Ouroboros will finally finish what it started.

This is not the first time I’ve seen one person’s personal pledge treated as a targeted judgment against other people. It’s not the first time I’ve seen men ignite the argument by being defensive. I find the argument of gender blindness suspect. I find most arguments about whether gender impacts someone’s reading choices oblivious at best, and a bunch of dressed up, internalized, misogynistic malarky at worst, like we’re some kind of post-feminist society and people making these claims sit on the board of High Overlords of Genre Progressives.

I rarely see general disinterest. I rarely see things like “That’s cool, bro! Good luck!”, followed, in my magical fantasy land, with some recommendations of books by ladies attached. What usually results from these “I just read whatever I want!” proclamations is more insidious. “I don’t see/care about gender.” gets attached as an faux-progressive rider and the resulting calls of bullshit on that antiquated gem leads to these people just chomping at the bit to prove they just read what interests them. They claim they don’t make it about gender in exceedingly creative, offensive verbal acrobatics that erases the very real struggle a lot of women in genre communities are still dealing with. So we have to live with the bile of defensive arguments foaming from the mouths of otherwise level-headed reviewers as they transform into Misogyny Monsters and start flipping tables because they have never learned to stop and think about why their first response is to grow defensive or disclaim their position. It’s as if they’ve never learned to stop and listen. Women can face problems in every step: getting published, read, listened to. It can be a trial to be heard as widely as their male counterparts; to write, or do, or say something and watch everyone walk past it for the same thing written, done or said by one man, or two, or three. Listening is a key component in learning new and fascinating things about people who have different life experiences from you. Listening is a progressive act. Gender blindness is not.

And the obvious response is, what happens when someone listens, considers, and still disagrees with you? Haha, trick question. In this context, “listen to the women” means “shut up and let the self-appointed arbiters of women’s interests lecture you until you agree.” Peezus Myers, with his usual ham-fisted, dunderheaded subtlety, said it flat-out: by definition, there can be no rational grounds for disagreement with his social-justice interpretation of feminist truth. Sorry, dudebro, but your hyperskeptical objections have already been anticipated and defined out of valid existence.

No doubt she’d disagree, but I hear what she’s saying. I’ve heard it before, expressed without the snark so as not to make anyone feel defensive, and yet I disagreed with it then, too. I simply do not feel that achieving gender parity in terms of authors getting published and reviewed in high-profile outlets is an important, let alone morally significant, issue. As it stands, it may not be fair, and it may not be a pure meritocracy, but it’s not like it’s a civil rights issue either. A 50% ratio of female authors whose SF/F books get reviewed by influential journals is not going to improve anything beyond the self-satisfaction of guilt-ridden people who yearn for such tangible metrics to reassure themselves that they aren’t unwittingly contributing to someone’s oppression. I feel that fixations with imposing such perfectly-divided pie charts onto various human endeavors, especially art, is rationalism taken to a ridiculous extreme. I don’t believe that the trendy cultural-studies obsession with privilege and axes of oppression has any relevance outside a broad, abstract context of dry statistical analysis, and most certainly not on the level of individual preference. And most damning of all, I don’t accept that my maleness predisposes me to those opinions, nor do I accept the unfalsifiable, Freudian-style attempts to read my mind and tell me why I really think like that. I don’t care in the slightest if that’s a “progressive” stance, all I care is that it’s not deluded.

Seeing this kind of argument actually offends me. I mean, whether we’re talking about genre fiction or lit-rah-chur, it’s all on an artistic continuum to me. Popular art can be just as capable of opening up wide vistas of imagination for fans. There’s no telling what sort of prose or imagery will leave a profound impression on an individual reader, or how exactly it will inspire them. And so, to see it treated as if the most important thing about a novel is the gender of the author or the protagonist, as if the main incentive to identify with a novel is to claim the author or the hero as a member of your “team”, as tally marks on an irrelevant scoresheet, irritates me to no end. It’s no less crass or philistinic than seeing some hack blog-pundit analyzing a blockbuster movie in order to claim it as a parable in support of whatever fucking news-cycle effluvia is currently occupying the web’s ephemeral attention span.

Let me take a little detour here: I listen to a lot of music. Much of it could be loosely placed on the “rock music” family tree, especially when I was younger and tended to favor British/American groups of young guys in four-or-five-man bands with guitars and keyboards. Even then, though, I was often frustrated by the way my musical taste was dismissed by uninterested people like my parents, who said it was all just a bunch of noise. What was wrong with them? How could they not hear or feel the obvious differences between aggressive thrash metal and mainstream hard rock? How could they lump bluesy rockers in with punks? How could they be so blind and deaf to the liberating, consciousness-expanding nuances that I perceived everywhere?

Nowadays, my palette is much wider, and even though the common denominator of a lot of my taste could be described as popular music performed by bands or singer/songwriters, the variety in styles and sensibilities makes a mockery of such crude reductionism. There are entire worlds contained in my musical collection. Only a fatuous, facile fuckwit, or a writer for a shallow pop-culture blog, but I repeat myself, would think that all music made by white and/or male artists somehow presents a monolithic perspective.

It’s no different when it comes to books. It’s an exotic fetishizing to see, say, female or black authors as in possession of some unique perspective by simple virtue of their gender or race, as if they’ve all had the same experiences across the board, as if those experiences are so specific to one demographic that no amount of sympathetic imagination by an outsider could approximate them.

No, what I can’t stand is the way that “diversity” has become a badge of moral superiority. Somehow you’re a better person if you happen to live in a place that has a lot of blacks and Latinos—even if that circumstance is no thanks to you, even if you live there for entirely different reasons, even if you don’t actually know any of those people, even if the groups are segregated economically (and even though your presence, ipso facto, reduces the level of that diversity). “I can’t stand Vermont—it’s so white.” Vermont’s white? You’re white, you idiot.

Diversity isn’t equality. It isn’t even integration. It is merely demographics. It has nothing to do, in this context, with the well-being of people of color. It’s not a moral issue; it is, precisely, an issue of lifestyle. White people like it because it enables them to feel good about themselves. When they see a black person in their neighborhood, they give themselves a gold star.

Well, bam! Nothing like a little bracing pugnacity early on a Monday morn. Switching contexts, while still speaking of vague feel-good gestures toward demographics, I saw this shortly thereafter:

Such is the question of why, in many major publications, far more books by men are reviewed than books by women. Probably the best-known set of statistics comes from an organization called VIDA, which has created a feature called “The Count.” That feature consists of pie charts that track the number of women and men both doing the reviewing and being reviewed. For instance, in 2011, they found that The New York Review Of Books reviewed 71 female authors and 293 male authors. In The New York Times, it was 273 women and 520 men.

Now, this kind of thing could be happening for lots of reasons, and like a lot of really complicated problems, it likely doesn’t involve anything that anybody is doing on purpose, and therefore it doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions through simple resolve. How several hundred books make it into a publication in a given year is the result of countless conscious and unconscious choices by readers, by authors, by book publishers, by reviewing publications, by reviewers and editors — it’s an incredibly complex and unwieldy problem to try to get your arms around. You don’t have to believe anyone is out to get women writers in order to think it’s important to ask the question of what the factors are that bring us to that point and to suggest that it’s not a great place to be.

No, you don’t, but skeptical as I am, I suspect that a loaded question like that arrives with certain presuppositions and unsubtly implies a very narrow range of permissible answers. Having already framed the disparity as a moral problem, anything less than apologies and promises of solutions will be seen as evidence of bias. There’s a sort of Freudian aspect to these kinds of arguments that bothers me — when you start suggesting unconscious bias as a motivation, what counts as evidence against it? If the NYRB comes back and says, “Well, we’ve rigorously examined our book reviewing standards and process, and no, we’re sorry, but we don’t see any reason to believe we’ve been unfairly biased with regards to gender,” will that be accepted? Again, I’m skeptical. For people inclined to see any ratio, in any context, favoring a privileged group as evidence that someone must be getting oppressed in the process, the conclusion is foregone.

The only way anything like numerical parity would be achieved is for it to become a conscious goal of reviewing publications, at which point book reviewing would subordinate the effort, however flawed, to apply disinterested aesthetic standards, however imperfect or historically contingent they may be, to activism.

NPR just wanted to ask its audience about their favorite young adult fiction. But this seemingly harmless gesture stirred up all sorts of controversy. Out of 100 books on the list, only three have non-white protagonists. Now, people are angry, or at least politely clearing their throats. Here’s the question: Who is to blame?

I’m referring to the list’s gender breakdown. If I’m not mistaken, there are just 23 records by women artists in the top 200, and only two in the top 50. And that’s a generous count, making room for co-ed acts like The xx, Beach House, and Portishead. Again, we can look to the self-selecting voting base. According to Pitchfork’s own stats, 88% of the poll respondents were men. “The Dudes’ List” might have been a more accurate title.

Still—what the hell is wrong with these dudes? Did it escape their attention that for much of the past decade and a half, female artists have had a stranglehold on the popular music zeitgeist? Have they never heard of Missy Elliott? Can they really prefer The National to M.I.A.’s Kala, to Bjork’s Homogenic, to Joanna Newsom’s Ys? Where are politics in all of this? If you surveyed the roughly 24,600 men who submitted “People’s List” ballots, I wager you’d find nearly 100 percent espousing progressive views on gender issues. This would not be the case if you took a similar survey of pop, R&B, or country music fans—yet a “People’s List” of top recordings in those genres from 1996-2011 with a similar gender breakdown is unimaginable. The fact is, when it comes to the question of women and, um, art, the Top 40’s great unwashed—and even red state Tea Party partisans—are far more progressive and inclusive than the mountain-man-bearded, Fair Trade espresso-swilling, self-styled lefties of indiedom. Portlandia, we have a problem.

But let’s wait a moment before concluding that Pitchfork is just anti-women. After all, it’s one of the very few sites out there that gives women more bylines than men. The lack of female artists on this list seems more like a nasty symptom than the underlying illness. The survey format could be the culprit. Crowd-sourced rankings like these always average out the most interesting choices, allowing the most middle-of-the-road selections to rise to the top. (What’s up, Interpol.) So, in a way, statistics might be to blame for the blandness of the People’s List.

Pitchfork has always been an anal-retentive, numbers-driven machine. Their reviews suggest that there’s a significant gulf between an album given a 6.4 and an album given a 6.5. They draft lists compulsively, attaching stone-cold numerical rankings to albums that emerge from very different contexts. And their reviews often read like a baseball player’s stat sheet, full of record label catalogue numbers, precise recording dates, gear specs, and other obscure figures that make Pitchfork a closer cousin to Sabermetrics, than, say, Rolling Stone. Talking about music in numerical terms codes Pitchfork’s discourse as masculine. That’s not to say that women are scared off by numbers, but geeking out over numbers has long been culturally framed as a “male” activity. (Are there female stat geeks? Sure. But not a very large percentage, we’d guess.) And aside from the issue of gender, discussing music through math simply feels bloodless. In the Pitchforkian approach, music isn’t something to be enjoyed, it’s something to be catalogued. Records aren’t a source of pleasure, they’re widgets that need to be placed into vertically-descending cubbyholes.

Yes, in the Pitchforkian approach. Can you believe those philistines, reducing art and entertainment to numerical quantification, rather than understanding culture as a battle of White Penises vs. Multihued Vaginas, as all right-thinking people should? The Pitchforkian approach, as opposed to the demographically correct approach of small-minded bureaucratic bean-counters like ourselves, who would squeal with delight if iTunes would allow us to view our library as a color swatch, a pie chart, or a genitalia count so that, in the totally unlikely event that we should ever be tempted to leave some aspects of life unsullied by crude agit-prop, we could quickly be reminded of our priorities. Ooh! Maybe it could even produce a composite sketch based on the racial/sexual makeup of our libraries, so it could sit there in the sidebar and shame us with its gaze!

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.